It is several years since I saw Teatro Kismet's Beauty and the Beast, but it remains a vivid memory - a show ostensibly for children, but so startlingly sensual, earthy and sexy that it was far too good to leave to the kids. It suggested that this Italian company had a prodigious ability to use visual theatre to mine the psychological world of fairytales with an acuity Freud would admire. This was theatre that worked on several levels simultaneously, and was much bolder than most work being made by UK companies for family audiences.

Back in the UK with a new show created with Tokyo's Setagaya Theatre, the company has turned to Hans Christian Andersen's story of frozen hearts and broken friendships healed by the power of love. It is good, but not quite as good as its predecessor, walking a far more tricky line between the comic and the dramatic; it never seems as multilayered as Beauty, or as confident in its excavation of the rich symbolism of Andersen's story.

Nonetheless, there are some interesting ideas, particularly in the way it sets up the beautiful but deadly Snow Queen as the older "other woman" in the budding relationship of adolescent Gerda and her friend Kay, who gets a splinter of the devil's mirror in his eye and falls prey to the charms of the icy enchantress. Indeed, you feel she may actually kiss him to death. She is quite a woman - completely at odds with the innocent Gerda, and even something of a martial arts expert. The suggestion here, perhaps, is that she is a rite of passage for Kay, who only belatedly understands his true love for Gerda. The pair's final dance is sweetly sensual.

The story is episodic, and Gerda's encounters with various characters such as the Crows and the Robber Princess, though entertaining enough, seem to detract from the dramatic urgency of her quest to save Kay. However, the show has a great deal going for it, particularly in its visuals, which make a statement right from the opening moment when we are introduced to the towering, devilish Grand Master and his incubi. It also features one of the most thrilling stage blizzards I've ever seen. If nothing else does, the snow will blow you away.